The Good Trade War

Chinese communist government economic planners have certain select authoritarian advantages over the west. The EU has Brexit and immigration issues that indicated elements of uncertainty and double-mindedness that China lacks. China is expansionist regarding Tibet and Taiwan and naval development with something more of single-mindedness about it with a dictator for life leading the Chinese Communist Party.

https://gizmodo.com/everything-that-happened-with-huawei-while-you-were-sle-1830929804

I don’t wish to imply criticism of Chinese government policy since it is developing along historical lines that are logical and somewhat deterministic regarding demographics, geography, world historical events, transition from prior forms of government and economic content. It is good that China participates in free enterprise to a certain extent. In my opinion the trade war is a mild correction on the political stage of the phenomenon of Chinese economic expansion with the reciprocal decline of the quality of U.S. economic content domestically.

A trade war may be the best approach to correcting or adjusting the way that foreign investors relate to China. Direct foreign investment accounts for about 3% of Chinese economic growth these days, I believe. That is more than 100 billion dollars annually (US) and the number is increasing. The rapid increase of foreign investment in the Chinese economy in monetary and intellectual capital leads American capitalists and government to neglect qualitative economic growth in the United States. The Roman empire experienced a similar decline in domestic infrastructure and economic development with a great deal of foreign investment in villas, vineyards etc. Of course imperial Rome earned much wealth from foreign conquests, while the United States built its wealth largely on the land and intellectual capital it was blessed with. Globalism for the United States means neglect of its domestic economic reality and preference for mass immigration of cheap labor and outsourcing of production to locations like China. Donald Trump is thought to be trying to counter some of those trends and to restore a national economic social priority.

For some ecologically minded economists there is an implicit value in building local or national sustainable economic development within a criterion of ecological economics. China is somewhat of an innocent bystander in the need for the United States to restore its economic vitality. And that restoration should be on the new foundation of ecological economics; a very challenging social task given the tremendous force of Wall Street investment and capitalist principals of profit in the given axiological (value) system as a secular god to worship.

The infrastructure of the United States is in decay while the public debt of the government is greater than 20 trillion dollars. Fifty million citizens have less that a half of 1% pf the national income. Plainly there is much to fix, yet economic leadership is based presently on a capitalism with the humanity of pimps selling out any nation including the U.S.A. as nothing more than a tool for corporate profit.

I suppose President Trump might like to have more investment in the United States than China. Yet much of the Chinese trade advantage is a result of American capitalists building in China and sending their product to the United States, and that is entirely legal. Meanwhile the U.S. Democrat party supports illegal immigration of cheap labor to bump out workers that can’t find good jobs that were sent to China. None of that is the fault of China, though there may be something to the value of the yuan and dumping of steel, I really can’t say.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene III, L. 140-141)